Tools

"... Understanding the implementation of a certain feature of a system requires to identify the computational units of the system that contribute to this feature. In many cases, the mapping of features to the source code is poorly documented. In this paper, we present a semi-automatic technique that reco ..."

Understanding the implementation of a certain feature of a system requires to identify the computational units of the system that contribute to this feature. In many cases, the mapping of features to the source code is poorly documented. In this paper, we present a semi-automatic technique that reconstructs the mapping for features that are triggered by the user and exhibit an observable behavior. The mapping is in general not injective; that is, a computational unit may contribute to several features. Our technique allows to distinguish between general and specific computational units with respect to a given set of features. For a set of features, it also identifies jointly and distinctly required computational units.

"... We present a new technique for removing unnecessary syn-chronization operations from statically compiled Java pro-grams. Our approach improves upon current eorts based on escape analysis, as it can eliminate synchronization oper-ations even on objects that escape their allocating threads. It makes u ..."

We present a new technique for removing unnecessary syn-chronization operations from statically compiled Java pro-grams. Our approach improves upon current eorts based on escape analysis, as it can eliminate synchronization oper-ations even on objects that escape their allocating threads. It makes use of a compact, equivalence-class-based repre-sentation that eliminates the need for xed point operations during the analysis. We describe and evaluate the performance of an im-plementation in the Marmot native Java compiler. For the benchmark programs examined, the optimization re-moves 100 % of the dynamic synchronization operations in single-threaded programs, and 0-99 % in multi-threaded pro-grams, at a low cost in additional compilation time and code growth.

"... During the past twenty-one years, over seventy-five papers and nine Ph.D. theses have been published on pointer analysis. Given the tomes of work on this topic one may wonder, "Haven't we solved this problem yet?" With input from many researchers in the field, this paper describes iss ..."

During the past twenty-one years, over seventy-five papers and nine Ph.D. theses have been published on pointer analysis. Given the tomes of work on this topic one may wonder, &quot;Haven&apos;t we solved this problem yet?&quot; With input from many researchers in the field, this paper describes issues related to pointer analysis and remaining open problems.

"... Abstract. This paper addresses the following question: Do scalable control-flow-insensitive pointer analyses provide the level of precision required to make them useful in compiler optimizations? We first describe alias frequency, a metric that measures the ability of a pointer analysis to determine ..."

Abstract. This paper addresses the following question: Do scalable control-flow-insensitive pointer analyses provide the level of precision required to make them useful in compiler optimizations? We first describe alias frequency, a metric that measures the ability of a pointer analysis to determine that pairs of memory accesses in C programs cannot be aliases. We believe that this kind of information is useful for a variety of optimizations, while remaining independent of a particular optimization. We show that control-flow and context insensitive analyses provide the same answer as the best possible pointer analysis on at least 95 % of all statically generated alias queries. In order to understand the potential run-time impact of the remaining 5 % queries, we weight the alias queries by dynamic execution counts obtained from profile data. Flow-insensitive pointer analyses are accurate on at least 95 % of the weighted alias queries as well. We then examine whether scalable pointer analyses are inaccurate on the remaining 5 % alias queries because they are context-insensitive. To this end, we have developed a new context-sensitive pointer analysis that also serves as a general engine for tracing the flow of values in C programs. To our knowledge, it is the first technique for performing context-sensitive analysis with subtyping that scales to millions of lines of code. We find that the new algorithm does not identify fewer aliases than the contextinsensitive analysis. 1

by
Matthew J. Bridges, Neil Vachharajani, Yun Zhang, Thomas Jablin, David I. August
- In Proceedings of the 40th Annual ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Microarchitecture, 2007

"... Single-threaded programming is already considered a complicated task. The move to multi-threaded programming only increases the complexity and cost involved in software development due to rewriting legacy code, training of the programmer, increased debugging of the program, and efforts to avoid race ..."

Single-threaded programming is already considered a complicated task. The move to multi-threaded programming only increases the complexity and cost involved in software development due to rewriting legacy code, training of the programmer, increased debugging of the program, and efforts to avoid race conditions, deadlocks, and other problems associated with parallel programming. To address these costs, other approaches, such as automatic thread extraction, have been explored. Unfortunately, the amount of parallelism that has been automatically extracted is generally insufficient to keep many cores busy. This paper argues that this lack of parallelism is not an intrinsic limitation of the sequential programming model, but rather occurs for two reasons. First, there exists no framework for automatic thread extraction that brings together key existing state-of-the-art compiler and hardware techniques. This paper shows that such a framework can yield scalable parallelization on several SPEC CINT2000 benchmarks. Second, existing sequential programming languages force programmers to define a single legal program outcome, rather than allowing for a range of legal outcomes. This paper shows that natural extensions to the sequential programming model enable parallelization for the remainder of the SPEC CINT2000 suite. Our experience demonstrates that, by changing only 60 source code lines, all of the C benchmarks in the SPEC CINT2000 suite were parallelizable by automatic thread extraction. This process, constrained by the limits of modern optimizing compilers, yielded a speedup of 454 % on these applications. 1

by
Rakesh Ghiya
- In Proceedings of the 2001 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, 2001

"... In this paper, we evaluate the benefits achievable from pointer analysis and other memory disambiguation techniques for C/C++ programs, using the framework of the production compiler for the Intel ® Itanium ™ processor. Most of the prior work on memory disambiguation has primarily focused on pointer ..."

In this paper, we evaluate the benefits achievable from pointer analysis and other memory disambiguation techniques for C/C++ programs, using the framework of the production compiler for the Intel ® Itanium ™ processor. Most of the prior work on memory disambiguation has primarily focused on pointer analysis, and either presents only static estimates of the accuracy of the analysis (such as average points-to set size), or provides performance data in the context of certain individual optimizations. In contrast, our study is based on a complete memory disambiguation framework that uses a whole set of techniques including pointer analysis. Further, it presents how various compiler analyses and optimizations interact with the memory disambiguator, evaluates how much they benefit from disambiguation, and measures the eventual impact on the performance of the program. The paper also analyzes the types of disambiguation queries that are typically received by the disambiguator, which disambiguation techniques prove most effective in resolving them, and what type of queries prove difficult to be resolved. The study is based on empirical data collected for the SPEC CINT2000 C/C++ programs, running on the Itanium processor. 1.

"... We show how to determine statically whether it is safe for untrusted machine code to be loaded into a trusted host system. Our safety-checking technique operates directly on the untrusted machine-code program, requiring only that the initial inputs to the untrusted program be annotated with typestat ..."

We show how to determine statically whether it is safe for untrusted machine code to be loaded into a trusted host system. Our safety-checking technique operates directly on the untrusted machine-code program, requiring only that the initial inputs to the untrusted program be annotated with typestate information and linear constraints. This approach opens up the possibility of being able to certify code produced by any compiler from any source language, which gives the code producers more freedom in choosing the language in which they write their programs. It eliminates the dependence of safety on the correctness of the compiler because the final product of the compiler is checked. It leads to the decoupling of the safety policy from the language in which the untrusted code is written, and consequently, makes it possible for safety checking to be performed with respect to an extensible set of safety properties that are specified on the host side. We have implemented a prototype safety checker for SPARC machine-language programs, and applied the safety checker to several examples. The safety checker was able to either prove that an example met the necessary safety conditions, or identify the places where the safety conditions were violated. The checking times ranged from less than a second to 14 seconds on an UltraSPARC machine.

"... Even as modern computing systems allow the manipulation and distribution of massive amounts of information, users of these systems are unable to manage the confidentiality of their data in a practical fashion. Conventional access control security mechanisms cannot prevent the illegitimate use of pri ..."

Even as modern computing systems allow the manipulation and distribution of massive amounts of information, users of these systems are unable to manage the confidentiality of their data in a practical fashion. Conventional access control security mechanisms cannot prevent the illegitimate use of privileged data once access is granted. For example, information provided by a user during an online purchase may be covertly delivered to malicious third parties by an untrustworthy web browser. Existing information-flow security mechanisms do provide this assurance, but only for programmer-specified policies enforced during program development as a static analysis on special-purpose type-safe languages. Not only are these techniques not applicable to many commonly used programs, but they leave the user with no defense against malicious programmers or altered binaries. In this paper, we propose RIFLE, a runtime informationflow security system designed from the user’s perspective. By addressing information-flow security using architectural support, RIFLE gives users a practical way to enforce their own information-flow security policy on all programs. We prove that, contrary to statements in the literature, runtime systems like RIFLE are no less secure than existing language-based techniques. Using a model of the architectural framework and a binary translator, we demonstrate RIFLE’s correctness and illustrate that the performance cost is reasonable. 1.